About

Stepping Stone is a program which allows you to communicate with your computer from an instant messenger client, allowing you to have shell access or accessing other services. There is an emphasis on ease of use for the remote user using a limited device such as a web enabled cell phone as well.

Stepping Stone was developed using C++, and has been compiled under both Windows and Linux. To compile Stepping Stone for yourself, you will need to have Boost 1.35 (or later) installed (or an earlier version with boost::asio manually installed into it), OpenSSL , and Hashlib++.

Stepping Stone is currently still in early stages of development. As of May 31, 2008 the only protocol that Stepping Stone supports is MSN Messenger, however more protocols will most likely be added as time progresses- depending on how much time this programmer and anyone who wants to help him has ;-)

How to Use

Use of Stepping Stone is configured through the use of files on the
machine it is running on. Files may either be in a sub-directory named
"Stepping Stone" in the users home directory (or the current users
Application Data directory on Windows), /etc on Linux machines (or all
users Application Data directory in Windows) or finally the subdirectory
and its files may be in the same directory as the program itself.

Comment lines start with either a "#" or a semicolon. If a value contains an equal sign, it must be escaped as \=. If the value is to contain a carriage return, linefeed or tab, they can be put in using the \r , \n and \t escape sequences. Hex values can be added as well with \xFF with FF being a hex value from 0-255. Use of the programs services via a messenger network is relative to these settings. Category names with a line whos first non whitespace charachter is [ and end at the last ] and are case sensitive.